528 ChaPter^10
MoRninG [oR MouRninG] in aMeRica: centRal aMeRica and
iRan-contRaOne key element of Reagan’s foreign policy actually began as a holdover from
the Carter administration. As we will see later in the chapter, Carter approved
a secret CIA operation in Afghanistan, which at that time was controlled by
a government supported by the Soviet Union. In December Soviet tanks had
rolled into Afghanistan at the invitation of that government because another
group, ironically more extremist Communist rebels, were trying to overthrow
it. Carter began a program of providing secret aid to guerrillas and resistance
movements [labeled terrorists when operating against U.S. economic foreign
policy goals but “freedom fighters” in this case] in an effort to bring down a
Soviet-backed government, and that became the centerpiece of the Reagan
Doctrine. Reagan’s foreign policy was designed to halt real and perceived
Soviet expansion by supporting anti-communist insurgents in Africa, Asia, and
Latin America. Reagan’s “Doctrine” was an updated version of “containment”
designed to open the door for Capitalism and to develop client states under
the guise of bringing down the Soviet Union.
In Reagan’s world, the Communists were as strong as ever and were pre-
paring to take over countries in America’s back yard, especially the region of
Central America, the small countries below Mexico [El Salvador, Costa Rica,
Honduras, Nicaragua, and Guatemala]. Reagan’s “fears” were imagined, as the
countries were run by brutal governments supported by the U.S. and the
opposition groups were not strong enough to overthrow them. Even more, the
Soviet Union itself coming apart as its own economy could not sustain the
huge military budgets it created to keep up with the U.S. in the Cold War.
Reagan, nonetheless, sponsored some of the most brutal repression in the
modern era. In Guatemala, the U.S. sent billions of dollars in aid and military
equipment to a government which, in the Cold War years after getting rid of
Arbenz, killed about a quarter-million people. In El Salvador, the U.S. spon-
sored a government that killed over 80,000 political opponents on the prem-
ise that the main anti-government group, the FMLN [Farabundo Marti
National Liberation group] was being controlled by Russia and Cuba, though
there was no legitimate evidence of that.
But in Nicaragua, the “Reagan Doctrine” received its most controversial
application. In 1979, leftist rebels known as the Sandinistas [named after Cesar